Growing up on the shore of the Great Salt Lake, I didn’t appreciate what a unique and valuable resource it is. Its all too familiar rotten egg smell, and clouds of dust blown in by summer thunderstorms made it a nuisance — the price we put up with for living on the Wasatch Front. Fortunately, sentiments like this are drying up, but so too is the lake.
As the Great Salt Lake’s water continues to recede, the vital role it plays in our ecosystem, economy and way of life becomes more apparent. While there are a lot of options to fill the lake, policies grounded in incentives and respecting private property rights are the most viable, fair and flexible.
During the 2026 Utah Legislative Session, the Legislature continued its efforts to pioneer the state’s water policy, ensuring more water reaches the Great Salt Lake through the voluntary actions of water rights holders. Among this session’s most important wins was the near-unanimous passage of the bipartisan HB410 Water Leasing Amendments.
The legislation makes it much easier and more organized for people — especially farmers — to temporarily lease their water to help restore the Great Salt Lake by making voluntary water transfers more predictable and scalable. It also tackled a very familiar Western water problem: If someone upstream agrees to leave water in the river to benefit the Great Salt Lake, what stops someone downstream from taking it before it reaches the lake?
HB410 further established that leased water is legally committed to an in-stream purpose and ensures that other water users cannot divert or impound that specific leased water just because it’s flowing past them. This legal change is hugely consequential.
The complexity of shepherding water through canals, dams and other obstructions makes it easy for those who don’t have a right to leased water to take it. A drop of water that falls in Utah’s mountains often traverses dozens of these man-made features before making its way to the Great Salt Lake. With each obstruction, the likelihood of someone using already leased water for their own purposes grows, because the infrastructure allows water to be more easily diverted than if it were just left in the river.
HB410 makes water leasing meaningful, not just theoretical. After all, incentives matter — not just for the farmers leasing their water but for the state government as well.
Both the farmer and the government need assurance that the promised outcome of actual water reaching the lake will happen. Should uncertainty exist with either party, the system breaks down, and neither benefits from the voluntary transaction. As the public, we want assurance that the tens of millions of taxpayer dollars that have been allocated by the Utah Legislature are actually producing real inflows to the Great Salt Lake.
As the public, we want assurance that the tens of millions of taxpayer dollars that have been allocated by the Utah Legislature are actually producing real inflows to the Great Salt Lake.
Utah has an opportunity and responsibility to be the first to save a dying saline lake. It won’t be easy, but nothing worth doing ever is. As our state motto “Industry” suggests, Utahns are no strangers to hard work. That hard work takes many forms — including the monotonous task of evaluating and tweaking state legislation to make water markets function as designed, while delivering water to the lake.
While not as flashy as previous Great Salt Lake bills, HB410 is the type of legislation we need to safeguard property rights, ensure incentive structures work as designed and deliver promised water to the lake.